Editor’s note: This is the second part of “The Saga of St. John’s” in an ongoing series about historic houses of worship under threat of erasure in Jersey City and Hudson County.

The first funereal image from 1960 — a casket held up by solemn-faced honor guards, the newly installed rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church, the Rev. Robert W. Castle, following them tranquilly, rigidly, in deep reflection and repose — is as corporeal and present-tense as the church ruin I stand in front of now, in 2020, at Summit and Gardner avenues, on a cloud-covered, pre-snowfall January morning in Jersey City.

More archival images — all black-and-white, stereoscopic, three-dimensional — become manifested in my mind and meet me head-on at the triple-portaled porch of the deserted, crumbling stone church.

BELLCOTE OVER SUMMIT AVENUE

The casket, aflow with flowers, is angled high as pallbearers enter a dark anteroom. A great sanctus bell rings from its bellcote above the main Summit Avenue doors. Wind, whipping and fierce, fades out as main double-doors are shut and sealed for the private service. Footsteps echo across the surface of encaustic floor tiles, return, and vanish into near-indecipherable ceiling peaks.

A few people — close kin, career-long acquaintances, former apprentices — occupy long pews to mourn, in soft, illusory light, Irving Underhill, the famed 19th- and 20th-century New York City photographer and dynastic resident of Bergen Hill, the Victorian-era neighborhood where St. John’s was erected between 1869 and 1871.

A side chapel inside the church drips with candles and Tiffany lancets marked with the Underhill surname. Requiem organ music plays for the deceased across the aisles. Shrines are en massed and ranked with idolic carvings. Cushioned kneelers are indented with the weight of the past prayerful. Massive tables, ossuaries, and prie-dieux fill impenetrable alcoves and chancel limits.

Reliquaries shine somberly behind tall stalls.

The Rev. Castle, St. John’s new rectoriate, presides on that 16th day of November. His face is elegiac, young, barely beyond 30, yet his voice is already filled with the wisdom and burden of legacies. It is intoned, perhaps unknown to him, with intense inner courage, moral propensity and civic prophecy — traits of strength and sanctity that would, nearly 50 years later, uplift embattled preservationists and inject hope into an urban monument under threat of erasure.

CLOSING DENOMINATIONAL DOORS

The Rev. Castle, laying to rest the last of the Underhills, must have sensed the end of a congregational era, a profound closing of denominational doors.

Born and raised in the West Bergen area of the city and educated at Yale’s divinity school, the cleric is certainly aware of St. John’s noble stature in local lore and appreciates each pioneer’s lofty place in parish archives. He is, undoubtedly, well informed about St. John’s founding in 1868 inside the nearby Library Hall — now the Library Hall Lofts but primordially the seat of government for Bergen City, a small residential hamlet hemmed in by hills and cliffs before consolidation, in 1870-1871, with the rest of what would become Jersey City — at Summit Avenue, Garfield Avenue, and Ivy Place as a progressive episcopal parish purposed with providing free pews to all.

Eyes on fire, he surely has heard about the civic-driven efforts of early church leaders like the Revs. E.L. Stoddard and George D. Hadley, true preachers of conscience and stalwarts in their turn-of-the-century time. Standing with fists pounding on the lectern of St. John’s — where Castle was assigned in 1960 in an only-one-chance attempt to save, as doicesan leaders described it, a dying parish — Castle, blood rushing, must have felt the first jolt of a new era of civic unrest and urban rioting, peaceful protests descending into police-provoked violence, and distant wars and atrocities of humankind.

Driven as if by birth to action, he might even, at that moment of mourning, presage his own prominent role in the coming tumult and, over eight action-packed years of tenure, somehow find friendship, peace, and love in the city’s long-battered minority communities.

32

St. John's Episcopal Church in Jersey City

OUT OF THE GATE

Castle’s years at St. John’s are, as these archival photographs expose, explosive, innovative, necessary for the period.

His term takes off with fierce anti-racial bias speeches and loud chastisements of elected officials. To the annoyance of the Newark Diocese, he takes his sermons to the sidewalk and infiltrates neighborhoods overburdened for years by sweeping neglect. The responsible are identified, called out, held to account. They become the central topic of his homilies, heard clearly in the neighborhood — and the local press — through St. John’s slammed-open doors.

He finds, on his walks, decayed and decrepit tenement lanes and labyrinths. At the outskirts of the Bergen Hill, Lafayette, South Bergen and Greenville neighborhoods, he beholds factory buildings idled, vacated and vandalized down to their shells and superstructures. He stands in front of metal-gate-shuttered storefronts, engaging residents young and old — African-American, Puerto-Rican, Christian, Muslim. He recognizes that the city’s main streets and hidden roads are pocketed more with empty lots than public parks. Children barely have a place to play. Trash is piled and packed down at the curb, against buildings. Suitable housing stock is almost nowhere to be found.

The Episcopal priest, looking toward New York City’s intense and dramatic faith activism, calls out Jersey City’s leaders on issues of inequality in housing and education, devastating gang violence, forceful arrests, unfair incarcerations and a troubling lack of basic services for the disregarded and the marginalized. He clashes famously with Mayor Thomas J. Whelan and quickly becomes his most potent nemesis and source of scorn. Heads of departments, unaccustomed to disclosure and discourse from local clergy, scramble to avoid the rector and his growing citizen constituency. Police chiefs criticize what they perceive to be his over-the-top tactics of sit-ins, street-blockings, and, as witnessed on one occasion in 1964, garbage-dumping at the steps of City Hall, an act that results in his first arrest.

One year after the next, right into the age of national and international risings and revolutions, the Rev. Castle lifts up his parish and transforms it into what it had been meant to be since 1868: a center for cultural richness, social support and political activism. Local clergymen become collaborators in his civil rights campaigns and crusades. Broadening his reach and widening his heart, he joins the front of the lines in Washington, D.C., Selma, Alabama, and Harlem.

When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. appears at Metropolitan A.M.E. Church in Jersey City, the Rev. Castle is front and center in the audience to hear what will be some of the Nobel Prize recipient’s final implorations for the rights of every citizen.

A CHURCH TO BE LOST

But there are prices to be paid — and, in the end, a church to be lost.

Physically and emotionally burned out by seemingly around-the-clock protestations and preaching duties, and with the responsibilities that come with a growing family, the Rev. Castle quits St. John’s in 1968, leaving behind a stronger community church, a parish with influence and impact. Young African-American men and women — burgeoning musicians, emerging playwrights, impassioned members of the Black Panthers — can call his church their one true home and haven.

St. John’s, after him, will, he trusts, falter and come close to dying no more.

He becomes a roving minister, administering to other parishes in nearby and distant cities, places in need of a bare-knuckled preacher, no matter how worn down. Not long after, he moves to the northern boundary of Vermont, near Canada, settling into an environment foreign to his urban soul, filled with a calmness and spirituality quite unlike anything he has ever known. It lasts long, this new life, this new terrain and milieu detached from the Summit Avenue church now rendered to memory.

But the 1980s come calling and revive his hunger for social righteousness. St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in the Manhattanville section of Manhattan is his new parish, his second chapter. It does not take long to get deep under the skin of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Invigorated, he challenges diocesan officials at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. Arrests are made.

The Rev. Castle has perhaps never felt more alive. St. Mary’s is his redemption, the church he can never abandon no matter the wear-and-tear.

Only an aging body forces him into permanent retirement. That, and a surprise second career as a film actor, thanks in part to his cousin Jonathan Demme, famous for Hollywood pictures like “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Philadelphia” and, the director’s personal favorite, “Cousin Bobby,” a feature-length documentary about Castle’s movie-worthy legacies at St. John’s and St. Mary’s.

Born in 1929, Castle died in 2012, at age 83, at his home in Holland, Vermont.

PRECIOUS BONES

These library-kept images, with their virtual hiss-and-pop sounds and high-fidelity voices, vanish as soon as I step back and cross Summit Avenue to get a wider view of this Jersey City landmark of social and civil rights, this architectural monument made memorable by the people who gave it rise and purpose. Precious bones — blue basalt blocks, sandstone lintels and arches, cast iron columns, wrought-iron railings — radiate from without and within with the reverend’s visage of rage and devotion, his last protest against the ruination that is, in our time, St. John’s.

Editor’s note: John Gomez, a life-long Jersey City resident, is the founder of the non-profit Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy. A newly-appointed member of the New Jersey State Review Board for Historic Sites , he holds a master of science in historic preservation from Columbia University and teaches urban architecture at St. Peter’s University. Email him at preservationtv@gmail.com.